I've been home sick all week with the mother-of-all-colds and have been listening off and on to Canada Reads. It's an annual event that aims to identify the one book that every Canadian should read because it will change your life and/or the planet in a positive and progressive way.
Here, for instance, is a description of one of the books in the running this year, The Marrow Thieves:
Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The Indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream.
In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. For now, survival means staying hidden. But what they don't know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves.
Climate change; natives being victimized by eee-ville non-indigenes; suffering; death: I can't think of another novel that is more up the Ceeb's sanctimonious alley.
Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, that unmanned drones fill the sky.
And when her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she quickly begins to be shaped by her particular time and place until, finally, through the influence of a mysterious functionary, she is turned into a deadly instrument of war.
Telling her story is her nephew, Benjamin Chestnut, born during war as one of the Miraculous Generation and now an old man confronting the dark secret of his past — his family's role in the conflict and, in particular, that of his aunt, a woman who saved his life while destroying untold others.
Nope. Not going to read that one, either, even if it "wins."
Finally, Ahmed Hassan, let me say this to you. You will have plenty of time to study the Qur'an in prison in the years to come. You should understand that the Qur'an is a book of peace; Islam is a religion of peace. The Qur'an and Islam forbid anything extreme, including extremism in religion. Islam forbids breaking the "law of the land" where one is living or is a guest. Islam forbids terrorism (hiraba). The Qur'an and the Sunna provide that the crime of perpetrating terror to "cause corruption in the land" is one of the most severe crimes in Islam. So it is in the law of the United Kingdom. You have, therefore, received the most severe of sentences under the law of this land. You have violated the Qur'an and Islam by your actions, as well as the law of all civilized people. It is to be hoped that you will come to realise this one day. Please go with the officers.
Douglas Murray has nothing but derision for these words. He writes:
First, what business is it of a judge to make such a statement? Why should Mr Justice Haddon-Cave think that being a judge in a British court also permits him to expound on Islamic theology? And what if he is wrong in his theological pronouncements? What if it is not the case that Islam "forbids anything extreme"? What if a lot of British subjects who are not Muslims discover that this judge is telling an untruth? What if he is wrong, and that the cure for a jihadist like Ahmed Hassan is not in fact confinement with the Quran and Sunna?
Mr Justice Haddon-Cave seems almost to suggest that "violating" the law of the Quran and Islam is an offense in itself -- one worth noting alongside the crime of putting a bomb on a packed commuter train. That his pronouncement was superfluous is obvious. That it is incorrect is at least equally so. But worst is that it will further erode the belief of the citizenry in their lawmakers.
Murray gets it. Mr Justice Haddon-Cave...not so much. In fact, not at all.
OTTAWA - Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to exonerate six First Nations chiefs who were executed by British Columbia's colonial government more than 150 years ago.
Trudeau's itinerary says he will "deliver a statement of exoneration" for the Tsilhqot'in chiefs in the House of Commons at 3 p.m.
The warriors were hanged following a deadly confrontation with white road builders during the so-called "Chilcotin War of 1864."
After the workers were killed, five chiefs arrived at what they believed would be peace talks with government representatives. Instead, they were arrested, tried and hanged, and a sixth chief was executed the following year in New Westminster.
The Tsilhqot'in have long disputed the government's authority to execute the six chiefs as criminals, describing the confrontation as an altercation between warring nations...
n 1862, Alfred Waddington began lobbying the press and his political allies for support to a wagon road from Bute Inlet to Fort Alexandria where it would connect to the Cariboo Road and continue on to the goldfields at Barkerville.[3] He received approval for the construction early in 1863. According to Waddington, it would reduce land travel from 359 miles to 185 miles and the total days consumed in packing freight from 37 days to 22 compared to the Yale-Fraser Canyon route known as the Cariboo Road favoured by Governor Douglas. The Bute Inlet Wagon Road was to follow the Homathko River valley from the mouth of Bute Inlet and then swing northeast across the Chilcotin Plateau to join the Bentinck Arm Trail at Puntzi Lake and the mouth of the Quesnel River. It was also one of the routes considered and advocated by Waddington for the transcontinental railway eventually constructed to what became Vancouver instead.[4]:192
Construction had been underway for two years when, on April 29, 1864 a ferryman, Timothy Smith, stationed 30 miles up the river was killed after refusing a demand from Klattasine, Tellot and other natives for food. Smith was shot and his body thrown into the river. The food stores and supplies were looted. A half ton of provisions were taken.[5] The following day the natives attacked the workers' camp at daylight. Three men, Peterson Dane, Edwin Moseley and a man named Buckley, though injured, escaped and fled down the river. The remaining crew were killed and their bodies thrown into the river.[6]
Four miles further up the trail, the band came upon the foreman, William Brewster, and three of his men blazing trail. All were killed. Brewster's body was mutilated and left. The others' bodies were thrown into the river. The band also killed William Manning, a settler at Puntzi Lake.[4]:192
A pack train led by Alexander McDonald, though warned, continued into the area and three of the drivers were killed in the ensuing ambush.[4]:192 In all, nineteen men were killd.
Who is Justin Trudeau to "exonerate" those responsible for such brutal acts in a bid to revise history to conform to current notions of "truth and reconciliation" (both of which are quite impossible when one is committed to telling lies about the past)?
Exactamundo. That statement of fact (you'll find it here) is the most succinct and spot on analysis/indictment of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann In Jerusalem I have ever read.
As the beclowning body sees it, Israel is five times as bad as the worst of the world's worst, a mindset which UN ambassador Haley (by far the brightest spot of Trump's revolving door administration) rightly condemns.
It's time to "warrior up," stop polluting the planet and give water the same rights and protections as human beings. That's the message Autumn Peltier, a 13-year-old Canadian, delivered personally to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday.
"Many people don't think water is alive or has a spirit," she told the diplomats gathered in New York City in her speech on World Water Day. "My people believe this to be true.
"Our water deserves to be treated as human with human rights. We need to acknowledge our waters with personhood so we can protect our waters," Peltier said, her five-foot frame standing on a stool behind the podium so she could reach the microphone.
The teenager from Manitoulin Island on Georgian Bay was invited as the "representative of civil society," joining UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and other international dignitaries for the launch the UN's International Decade for Action on Water for Sustainable Development.
The campaign by member states aims to better manage and preserve world water resources.
By all means, let's be good stewards of the planet and pollute it as little as is humanly possible. At the same time, though, let's not succumb to sheer silliness merely because of the age and provenance of the individual who uttered it.
Consider me not at all gobsmacked by the report's findings. After all, with the BBC, other highly influential media outlets and elites in academia and the political sphere thundering on almost daily about Israel's "moral crimes" (including the worst one of all, the "crime" of its existence on land claimed in perpetuity by the Palestinians, the group which claims Most Favoured Victim status in the U.K. and the EU), and with a large and growing population of Muslim voters to pander to--one would be shocked if Judenhass/Zionhass wasn't all the rage there.
